'Being there': Remote working and trust

In a recent project we conducted on business travel clothing and travel routines, one of our research participants remarked the following on the impact of the recent Covid-19 related travel restrictions: “If you’re not there in person, you won’t win work”. As a frequent traveller who had flown two to three times per month for business-related meetings (pre-Covid), he attributed this to being able to “read the room” and the appreciation his colleagues felt from his effort of ‘being there’. And this was no outlier; practically every other research participant in this project echoed this belief in one way or another. But replicating such sentiments has been near impossible in the recent travel shutdown as businesses and individuals across the world have grappled with the newfound remote working landscape thrust upon them.

There are, of course, many other reasons why ‘being there’ in person may never be entirely supplanted by digital tools, however sophisticated those tools. Being able to “read the room” is of course high up there. However, when we read a room, what exactly are we doing? Well, one aspect of this might include looking at the body language of other people in the room: these non-verbal signifiers are often far more important than what is actually being said in the room, something nigh impossible to reproduce in a Zoom or Skype call. What else? Being able to develop emotional connections and engage with people is much easier in-person. We can make small talk about things we saw or experienced on the way, or in the office. Indeed, it is often through small talk — prompted in those small moments of time while we wait together to grab a coffee between meetings perhaps, or at the elevator, or over a cigarette that relationships are built. These are the moments in time where we might share something about ourselves or our interests and find common ground, usually outside of the business at hand. And as anyone with even the slightest experience of business knows — building good relationships is one of the most important factors to business success. And this leads us on to something that is foundational to not just business relationships, but of human relationships in general — that of trust.

It would not be an overstatement to state that modern society is built on trust, without which, it could not operate. We depend and place our trust in innumerable chains of unseen others to carry out even the simplest action in modern society — whether getting on a bus at a scheduled time, or crossing safely on a pedestrian walkway, or making a transaction at the bank or grocery store. Trust affords us the ability to reduce social complexity and avoid complete paralysis in our everyday lives. And this extends to technology — we have to trust that the plane won’t fall out of the sky, that the car will respond to our direction.

In the micro view, trust also pervades our social relations. The literature is much too vast in this field to even touch upon, but we can say that the development of trust is one of the first states of human psychosocial development, the attainment of which in the first few years results in feelings of security, confidence and optimism in later life. The development of trust in the formative years has been theorised as being one of the key determinants of subjective wellbeing and the fostering of good relationships in later life.

So how does this translate to remote, digital situations when we perhaps do not have the time to build up a sense of trust in the typical ways we might when fostering friendships or relationships? In business situations, through necessity, we typically have to place our trust in veritable strangers who we might only have communicated with in a purely task- or objective-based manner. Whether we are concluding a deal with a client, or collaborating on a new idea with a partner, how does trust figure into these contexts? And why, if we are to accept what our respondents said as true, is it difficult to win work or reach agreement when not there in person?

One answer might be the importance we place in touch. Whether through a handshake (or lately the elbow touch), or a business-appropriate hand on the arm to conclude a meeting, touch conveys warmth and builds trust. Digital communication tools have many good attributes, but they can never duplicate the human element that touch conveys. Similarly, we have all heard the adage of the importance placed in looking someone ‘in the eye’ to determine trustworthiness. People’s pupils dilate and constrict when they experience differing emotions — happiness, excitement, anxiety and so on. If your client or business partner is unhappy with work done, or undecided about a deal, being there in-person is likely the only way one might ‘get a feel’ for this through eye-contact.

These are only a few of the reasons why being there in-person offers advantages in business contexts over remote communications. However, I would suggest that there is something else at stake in these interactions which has so far been largely overlooked. When we have experiences with people in-person, we are not just sharing something that goes on ‘inside the head’; rather knowledge and experience are generated through mutually constitutive activities. That is, the fullness of our in-person experiences in shared environments helps generate new knowledge, understanding, and trust with each party helping to shape the other. The social anthropologist Jean Lave calls this an ‘outdoor psychology’ (1988) wherein thinking and doing are inseparable from whole body-persons working together through joint activities of immersion in the world. This ‘communion of experience’ (Ingold 2000: 167) is at the heart of sociality, but it involves moving in a shared environment, inhabiting a common ground of experience and producing shared knowledge, despite perhaps coming from different points of entry. As Jackson notes, such a view is at the heart of what makes anthropological fieldwork possible in the first place (1989: 135).

It is my suggestion, that when we are deprived of these shared activities, however brief they may be — the small talk while waiting for coffee, being present and being able to read a room, the after-meeting evening dinner etc. — we are also deprived of generating mutually constitutive experiences that go some way to alleviating the sense of unfamiliarity we all experience when thrust into a room of a ‘strangers’ and compelled to interact to conduct mutually beneficial, but potentially ‘risky’ business. It is in these small ‘human’ moments that we create shared knowledge and experience that ultimately make the trip worthwhile, and, to return to our original contention, potentially win work with more certainty than through a video conference.

This is not to deny, however, the manifold benefits that videoconferencing presents. How else can we talk to colleagues and friends in different cities, countries, and locations with nothing more than a laptop or smart phone and an internet connection? Not to mention the environmental benefits that videoconferencing bestows. While the current crisis will without doubt change business travel and work routines far into the future, many of which will be welcome, it is also worth reminding ourselves, that we are, fundamentally, social creatures. The video conference, as one of the many tools that we have cultivated in the long course of our development to maintain our social relations, is just that; a tool to augment our continuing need to stay in touch.

To conclude, in this new business landscape, the challenge remains how we can best adapt ourselves to this changed environment. Business travel will of course continue, (although it will undoubtedly become more purposeful), and the ‘death of the office’ is not with us yet. Nevertheless, perhaps we can start thinking about the different ways we might replace the lost elements that we have always relied upon to create a sense of trust in shared physical space when none is forthcoming. One of humanity’s greatest endowments is our ability to share common understandings, through shared activity, despite coming from sometimes radically different cultural backgrounds. And it would appear, that we need to remind ourselves of that, and find new ways to cultivate it, now more than ever.

References

Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.

Jackson, M. 1989. Paths toward a clearing: radical empiricism and ethnographic inquiry. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.